About Notes & Doodles

About

Arts405 Final Project created over the course of my last year at Colgate University (Fall 2016-Spring 2017). Four out of over two hundred drawings are shown.

This project began when I was doodling the funniest quote said by the guest professor during a Biology Lecture.
I soon developed a practice of drawing during any event I attended, from classes to lectures to dorm hangouts.
Each drawing was created in real time, during the duration of each event.

I wanted to capture a sense of the characters and conversations that exist within a space.
At Colgate, many conversations are insular, limited to the particular space, group of people, or event during the time they took place. Thus, one of the goals of this piece was to share information from one area of campus to another.
I did this with the intention of normalizing “challenging" conversation topics, including race, gender, consent, privilege, social culture, science, art, sexuality, mental health, religion, politics, and more. Notes & Doodles tells stories. This piece itself is a large, fragmented narrative, which, when brought together, tells the story of Colgate from multiple spaces, perspectives, and identities.

While the main purpose of this piece was to document interactions at Colgate, another concept behind this piece was self-representation. I wanted to express daily life through the eyes of a senior/double-major in Biology and Studio Art, through the lense of an Asian woman, through the lens of a student of color. This work, in a sense, is a reclamation of Asian identity and normalization of my intersectional perspective. This work does not claim to represent the greater Asian-American community; it merely shows a facet of what the Asian, first-generation perspective can be.

Read

Social

Throughout this project, I shared drawings with all participants: fellow peers, faculty, staff, guest lecturers, and friends. Two doodles live in NASA Headquarters in D.C., as two guest lecturers from NASA came to speak at Colgate in 2017. One doodle is framed in the hair salon of my stylist, Tina, because she loved how much the sketch "looks like me!" Other doodles were shared via email and reposted on social media platforms. All of them can be found in my book, Notes & Doodles (in process of being self-published). Below are some social posts on my work.

Installation

Notes & Doodles was displayed in the NOTHING IS LESS. LESS IS MORE. MORE IS TOO MUCH. show in the Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University from April 19-May 21, 2017. Photos by Mark Williams and Angel Trazo.

Display of 180 drawings from Notes & Doodles.

Display of 180 drawings from Notes & Doodles and 2 copies of book and order sheets.

Close up of doodles.

Installation 2.0. I vandalized my own artwork to get my point across more strongly and call the institution to reflect on its prioritization of certain art styles/artists over others.

THANK YOU

Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey. It means so much to be able to create and share my artwork!